The Tangled Wing

My copy of Melvin Konner’s The Tangled Wing:  Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit is held together by four long pieces of old fashioned, plain silver duct tape.  It fell apart on me during this last reading, suggested by a mentor who has taken issue with what may look like (perhaps because they are?) exaggerations about the human capacity to change that seem to be inscribed in the idea of “plasticity” that I’ve been promoting.

If you’ve never read the book, my recommendation would be that it is a delightfully readable presentation of the biological foundations of human nature, written by a scientist who is also a careful reader of fiction, drama, and other literary sources of insight, and who knows how to think about these things at the same time.  In other words, it is rare book.

This isn’t a review, but there are two things I take away from the book that are of interest to me as I think about human plasticity.  First, Konner’s account of human nature brings together in interesting ways the tremendous weight of our evolutionary inheritance (“biological constraints”), which places inevitable limits on what kinds of behavioral responses are possible to us as a species, and the other hand the absence of complete determination of human behavior by biological factors.  On this second item, Konner is very clear that genes don’t determine behavior—they rather influence behavior through a wide range of other, largely environmental factors.  Even the architecture of the human brain itself is not a product of the genes alone—whole areas of the brain may become larger or smaller as a result of differing kinds of experience.   Important experiments involving the social isolation of rats, for example, have demonstrated that detectable changes in the structure of the brain can be explained on the basis of neural developments that arise in response to stimulus-rich and stimulus-poor environments.

Konner himself summarizes these two aspects of the matter in terms of both “fixity” and “plasticity,” and you have to have both concepts in order to achieve some grasp of what is going on in human and other animal behavior.  This is a fine way to try and get our heads around what Konner is saying in the book, so long as we don’t think of that which is “fixed” as a particular part of human nature that can never change, and on the other hand that which is “plastic” as that other part of human nature that can change very easily, almost without any resistance at all.  It is doubtful, though it is possible, that there are five or six (or whatever number of) human characteristics that are always and everywhere the same, but it would be wrong (I believe) to think of these as “fixed.”  First, they are contingent developments that occurred over our very circuitous evolutionary history:  less momentary, perhaps, than waves cast up by a restless sea, but not logically different from them even if on a different time scale.  Also, they are always culturally and individually articulated and expressed.  Human beings are social creatures, for example, inevitably and everywhere gathering together in groups:  but this says little about what groups are for among particular peoples, how they are related to individual initiative, and a host of other non-trivial matters; nor does it say anything about how to understand what we call “anti-social” (or, perhaps more interestingly, socially indifferent) behaviors.  And, on the other hand, almost nothing about who we are is not entangled with a host of other things about us and thus easy to change.  What I’m getting to here is that “fixity” and “plasticity” can best be understood not as adequate descriptions of certain human characteristics but as polar terms:  each expresses one logical and not regional aspect of human nature.  Each applies to every one of human nature’s actual components or characteristics.  A homely example:  my coffee obsession is in some ways now fixed, because, even though I quit drinking coffee (with some “slips”) for medical reasons in 2009, I will always have the same synaptic receptor sites in my brain that are activated by certain stimuli that have been for me associated with coffee (this is the neurological description of craving), and it is also both a result of brain plasticity (since the wiring together of olfactory  and visual neurons with those that responded to actually drinking coffee came together when I began getting obsessed with coffee back in college) and subject to further plasticity in the forms of sublimation and other learned skills for coping with my cravings.

The second take-away from Konner’s book for me comes in its later chapters, when Konner comes to meditate on the human “prospect.” It is a little more difficult to sift out the science when he turns toward prognostication, because this is where he is most richly conversational with literary sources.  But what I can gather is that Konner is deeply pessimistic without being fatalistic. This mindset is the result of his polar emphasis upon fixity and plasticity.  His pessimism is unleashed with particular force on a group (the majority, I take it) of social scientists and reformers he calls “tinkerers.” These are they who think that people are basically good (or, in less value-laden terms, functional), but need a tweak or two here and there to make “everything all right” again.  These “tinkerers” are not condemned as deluders, but are critiqued as those who are deluded, perhaps by their methods, likely to some degree by a general unwillingness to face the unvarnished truth.  Everything, for Konner, is not going to be “all right.”  And that is because the human problem is much deeper than most social scientists and reformers are able to grasp. To take one example, we have capacities for both “pity” and “grief” as parts of our evolutionary inheritance, but grief is more personal and more laden with emotional force than is pity, so that, confronted everywhere by genuine occasions for grief, our capacity for pity is muted or dampened.  This would be ok (it was okay, in fact, when we lived in small, face-to-face societies), but in large-scale societies where real-world relations of cause and effect extend far beyond family and kinship ties, this diminution of pity by more personal grief is dangerous, and also quite ugly.  To take another example, our fearfulness over possible losses in an uncertain future creates in us an urge to accumulate (Side note:  “scarcity” is not something that we have invented in modern capitalism!).  As human nature as we know it was taking shape,  this was okay since it led to behaviors that were helpful during descents into long winters, but it has led to a spiraling concentration of resources into the hands of a comparative few, and the results are both ugly (Konner cites the “tinsel mansions” of Malibu) and dangerous.  The point for Konner is not the romantic one that if we could recover our ancient past, everything would be fine; it is the more tragic one that the very adaptations within human nature that enabled us to survive and flourish ultimately make flourishing problematic and survival actually somewhat doubtful.

But Konner is not fatalistic—in fact he cannot be.  It is unrealistic to think that we can educate or engineer ourselves out of human selfishness, for example (Its roots are far too deep for that to happen in the near future, and even in the distant future it is hard to see how it would happen.).  But as a society we can develop policies that deal with human selfishness in a clear-eyed and useful manner, limiting its disadvantages and perhaps even leveraging the motivations it entails for nobler or at least more sustainable purposes.  Developing policy, too, is a human behavior, and as such it is rooted in a nature that is both weighted by an ancient inheritance and capable of indeterminate modifications.  Out of this polarity could arise wisdom, not just in the sense of understanding human nature but in the sense of using such understanding to make life possible in the future.

Why did my mentor tell me I should read The Tangled Wing again?  Probably to get me thinking about human nature in broader, more adequate terms than are immediately suggested by the term “plasticity,” which seems to denote only one side of Konner’s polarity.  I will devote another blog entry at some point to defending “plasticity” as already inclusive of both inner structure (fixity) and malleability (Konner’s more narrow understanding of plasticity), but here let me acknowledge the importance of the point.  “Change,” in any useful or desirable sense, is itself in what we may call a polar relationship with continuity.  No one would really want a break from all that is familiar.  This is perhaps more keenly felt among Gen-Xer’s (my age group) and younger than it was among young people of immediately prior generations, since we are a cohort whose deepest longing is perhaps not to stumble into some form of life that is entirely new but to preserve some semblance of the life that we have now or that we grew up thinking we would have—to form bulwarks against social and economic catastrophes that rumble beneath our feet as the political compact of the twentieth century crumbles away from us; to stop or at least to slow the lurching of our world toward environmental catastrophe and the flooding of the cities some of us grew up in or (more likely) near.  In any case, it would be not only a fantasy but a frightful one to imagine change as somehow untethered from the continuities that give change both context and meaning.

So, no adequate account of human nature can effect such an untethering.  As I will write in a later post, the notion of plasticity is supposed to strengthen the tether, so that continuity and change are ontologically welded rather than opposed. Change is something that happens to and with continuity, and continuity as a temporal achievement is the product of and fodder for continual change.

This view of things is a step removed (abstracted) from Konner’s concerns, and it would hold, I take it, even if the human species doesn’t survive the challenges that we face, even if the tragic conflicts within human nature push us finally over the cliff once and for all.

To believe in God, I wrote in my first post, is to have passion for change.  To make this clearer, I add that it is to believe that change is not unconnected from or simply opposed to goodness or to various particular goods that perdure through the changes.  Change is not Chronos, perpetually devouring his children.  Rather, the change for which we are intelligibly passionate is the unending process of organizing, disorganizing, and re-organizing (configuring, disfiguring, re-configuring; forming, deforming, reforming, etc.) the fragile but flexible goods that circulate through our world, goods to which we can always commit ourselves in their unending profusion of forms, human and inhuman, come hell or high water.